zens twenty-five years of age or older. Of these adults 1018 had never
attended school at all. In addition, 3884 had attended school four
years or less. Thus, 4902 Persons -- substantially more than 25 per
cent -- were classified, for all practical purposes, as functional illiter-
ates.

A plethora of articles and feature stories have been written in
national magazines and metropolitan newspapers about this para-
dox of medieval stagnation in the midst of twentieth-century pros-
perity and progress, but none of them has traced the long road over
which the Southern mountaineer has traveled to the helplessness
and hopelessness which so frequently marks him today.

The people of the Southern mountains share a similar history and
background and, with local variations, they have journeyed together
into the tragedy which now enfolds them. The same geologic proc-
esses which culminated in the Kentucky coal seams produced similar
deposits in a small corner of Maryland, and in Virginia, West Vir-
ginia, Alabama and Tennessee. The mining industry developed in
each of these states along the same general lines though during some-
what different periods of time. Few of the deep social and eco-
nomic forces which afflict a people stop at lines drawn on political
maps, and the pressures which have undermined the character and
independence of the Kentucky coalfield mountaineer have been at
work with similar results in other states. What I shall say about the
Kentucky coal miner applies, with local modifications, to the
entire coal-producing area of the Southern highlands.

The mountaineer can present no enigma to a world which is inter-
ested enough to look with sympathy into the forces which have
made him. And look we must, because with his fruitful wife and
brood of untamed children he presents a problem to the nation
which is many-faceted and which will deepen in complexity during
the ensuing decades. As the nation moves toward the challenges of a
new century and a world ringing with change, it cannot afford to
leave huge islands of its own population behind, stranded and
ignored. Idleness and waste are antipatbetic to progress and
growth, and, unless the Cumberland Plateau is to remain an anchor

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